MPlayer

The Linux video "Swiss Army knife", which plays almost every movie format imaginable [1].

The player is rock solid playing damaged MPEG files (useful for some VCDs), and it plays bad AVI files which are unplayable with the famous windows media player. Even AVI files without index chunk are playable, and you can temporarily rebuild their indexes with the -idx option, or permanently with MEncoder, thus enabling seeking! As you see, stability and quality are the most important things, but the speed is also amazing. There is also a powerful filter system for video and audio manipulation.[2]

For more info about MPlayer command line parameters and other control keys, please read the MPlayer man page

Watching Analogue TV

A sample MPlayer command line that will play TV for Europe, channel E2, for devices that use analog audio wired from the TV card audio output into the aux or cd audio input on the motherboard or on the audio card:

If your board provides a digital audio input, don't forget to load the alsa module for it. In this case, you'll need to teach mplayer to read the audio stream as well. This is an example of using mplayer for viewing TV on a NTSC video stream, reading also the audio stream:

In this case, it is assumed that the -alsa module created as the second audio adapter (hw:1), and supports an audio rate of 48 kHz. There are more useful information about audio setups with alsa modules on Saa7134-alsa.

To avoid having to specify all the above parameters, it is recommended to write them to the ~/.mplayer/config:

Watching DVB Streams

One method of using MPlayer to watch DVB streams is outlined in the Testing your DVB device article. However, it is a convoluted solution, and is much more suited for testing purposes rather then daily use. A much simpler and convenient method is outlined below.

Note: The following methods require that you configure a channels.conf file and store it in ~/.mplayer (instructions on how to do this are detailed in the Testing your DVB device article) before you can actually use MPlayer to view or record DVB streams.

That command will result in your DVB device receiving the first channel listed in your channels.conf and displaying that stream's contents in MPlayer. You can then move forward through your channel list by pressing h (next) on your keyboard. Conversely, pressing k (previous) on your keyboard will move backwards through your channel list.

If you wish to open a specific DVB stream (as listed in the channels.conf file), type:

$ mplayer dvb://"STREAM NAME"

"STREAM NAME" is, of course, a generic descriptor and you will have to substitute the correct name accordingly (e.g. BBC, CBS, CBC, ....)

Note: Around the stream name you can use double parenthesis, single parenthesis, or none at all

Of course, for even better results, you may wish to run MPlayer with some options (mplayer dvb:// <options>). For example, to utilise linear blend deinterlacing for display/playback, run:

$ mplayer dvb:// -vf pp=lb

You may have to force demuxer type for better results. For example, for a DVB-T device (all DVB devices?):

$ mplayer dvb:// -demuxer mpegts

See the MPlayer man page (i.e. in a console run "man mplayer") for a lengthy list of available options (an online version is found below in the links section).

Usage with more complex DVB device configurations

If you choose not to specify a device adapter and/or frontend, as was the case in the examples shown in the section above, then MPlayer will default to using /dev/dvb/adapter0 and /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0. Alternatively, you can be very specific with MPlayer in terms of which hardware is to be used -- a point of interest to those:

with multiple DVB device adapters in their system, or

whose device adapter has multiple frontends, or

who have multiple adapters and some, or even all, of which have multiple frontends!

If you have more than one DVB device adapter installed in your system you can specify the device to use by passing the device number in the command syntax. MPlayer uses device numbers of 1-4. For example:

$ mplayer dvb://"DEVICE NUMBER"@"STREAM NAME" <options>

Which will open the default frontend ("frontend0") on the adapter you specify.

Some device adapters also have multiple frontends. In which case, you can specify which frontend on the adapter to use by passing the frontend number along with the device adapter number. For example:

Recording DVB Streams

This will dump the stream in MPEG-TS format to the file stream.ts (Note that this file can be very large - ~1GB for 30 minutes).

You can then use MPlayer or MEncoder, a command-line encoder built on the MPlayer code, to convert that file to a usable video format.

There is even more functionality in MEncoder when it comes to recording streams.

MPlayer and Satellite Dishes

If you are using MPlayer with a satellite dish that has a C-Band lnb LO: 5150 or standard Ku Band lnb LO: 10750 such as are commonly used in North America, MPlayer will tune the channel if you use the L Band frequency in your .mplayer/channels.conf file instead of the C or Ku Band frequency. To calculate the L Band frequency for C Band, 5150 minus frequency in Mhz equals L Band frequency in Mhz. For Ku Band, frequency in Mhz minus 10750 equals L Band frequency in Mhz.

For example to tune C Band 4.060 Ghz

5150 - 4060 = 1090

Use 1090 for the frequency in channels.conf instead of 4060.

For Ku Band 11.799 Ghz

11799 - 10750 = 1049

Using MPlayer for Radio Listening

You can do a lot of things with MPlayer. An example of commandline syntax used for radio listening is:

Note that this command will work even without audio cable between the output of the radio card and a line input of the audio card.

This will start MPlayer with sample rate = 48 kHz (using the same sample rate that the sound card is using gives best results), listening to the second station on the list, the tuner is the third sound card (ALSA device hw:2). For more examples and syntax: MPlayer radio tips.

You can add as many stations as wanted and use LIRC to control MPlayer.

If you are, say, running JACK all the time, you can add

ao=jack,alsa

into ~.mplayer/config (for MPlayer) and mplayerplug-in.conf (for Firefox mplayerplug-in). For recording, you can use any JACK aware recording application.

A XDialog wrapper can be made for radio listening using MPlayer and v4l2-ctl. The authour found that it was so good that they decided to make it public under the name XDRadio. You will have to make a list of your stations during the installation (very easy to do). After that, all that is required is to just to run it and enjoy the radio.

Using MPlayer for Webcam Viewing

Can be used to view webcam video by invoking 'mplayer tv://'.

High Quality Video Playback

MPlayer will play almost anything with the default settings, but with careful selection of the command line parameters (i.e. test samples, trial-and-error and patience) it is possible to achieve very high quality video playback. When you are satisfied with the results provided by certain parameters, you can add them to the ~.mplayer/config file so that they are used persistently and don't have to be manually passed to the application. Type "man mplayer" for a detailed listing of available options. Pay particular attention to: